By Dixon Wragg
WaccoBB.net
For over three years now, one Daniel Osmer has been providing a valuable service to the local community by organizing and hosting a weekly event called “The Science Buzz Café”. We gather in a café or restaurant to enjoy illustrated lectures on various aspects of science, from geology to physics to biology to math and beyond, presented by an actual scientist or, sometimes, a well-informed amateur. Usually these have been scientific enough to please a rationalist like me, though sometimes they have slid into the woo-woo realm a bit—not unusual in this part of California.
On March 10th, 2011, the Science Buzz Café presented Dr. Sondra Barrett on “Molecules and Meaning”. Ordinarily in a lecture-discussion format like the Science Buzz Café, I’d just raise my hand and dispute any seeming baloney when called upon. But, as I gradually realized, this presentation was so thoroughly riddled with fallacy that I would have had to speak at some length to address it, and since it was her show, not mine, that would have been an inappropriate spotlight-grab. So instead I’m using this column to show how critical thinking can be applied to assessing claims in a real-world situation.
Here’s an example of Barrett’s reasoning:
Photo by kind permission of Dr. Sondra BarrettShe showed a photo of an ancient petroglyph (rock art) with a sort of intertwined pattern, and told us that it reminded her of DNA, so the person who carved it may have known about the structure of DNA through some kind of inner vision! Then she showed a circular petroglyph decorated with various features and said that the artist may have known about microscopic cellular structure, because it was a picture of a cell!
Of course, anyone can match images to one another like that. The simple mandalas (circular designs) drawn by primitive people, little children or anyone can be seen as the sun, the earth, atomic nuclei, symbols of wholeness, or cells, among many other things. Intertwined designs could remind us of woven textiles or straw or hair, of the braiding of water in rocky streams—or of DNA. We can match any simple design—squares, crosses, triangles, you name it—to hundreds of images. I pointed that out to Barrett, suggesting that instead of matching recent scientific findings like the structure of DNA to petroglyphs retrospectively, the real test of her idea would be to proactively find in some ancient art the next big scientific breakthrough before the scientists find it. That didn’t even slow her down.
She also stated that the number three is special, so that keeping the principle of threeness in mind may help us understand the world. She started listing examples— birth, life and death; three letters in the genetic code; holy trinities in various religions—and encouraged audience members to shout out other examples. But she conveniently ignored the fact that she could just as well have deemed two, four or five special and made similar lists for those numbers. Generally, the smaller the number, the more examples you can find. She had latched onto the idea of threeness being special, then cherry-picked the data that fit, ignoring all the disconfirming data.
Threesomes
Barrett also showed a photomicrograph of the vitamin niacin. It was striated and a sort of tan or yellowish brown, resembling a stand of wheat seen from the side. She found this very exciting, because after all, wheat has lots of niacin! She even stated as a general principle that the appearance of things on our macrolevel, the human scale, mirrors their structure on the microlevel, and thus may give us information about the microworld.
But does that mean that everything rich in niacin looks like wheat or, more broadly, that we can tell which foods are high in some nutrient by looking at photomicrographs of that nutrient? Of course not! Most niacin-rich foods, such as various organ meats and seafoods, bear no resemblance to her wheat-like picture of niacin. To support her conclusion that there was some significance to the coincidental visual similarity of wheat and niacin, Barrett had to ignore all of those niacin-rich foods that looked nothing like the picture. So again, she got some exciting idea in her head, then cherry-picked the data to support it. This is science? It’s not even minimally reasonable.
Those examples are typical of Barrett’s talk (even the part I didn’t stay for, as was verified by a friend of mine who did stay), and they provide us with good real-life examples of a very common fallacy, one we’ve all indulged in: the “confirmation bias”—our natural tendency to see things in ways that confirm what we want to believe (or sometimes what we’re afraid is true); noticing, remembering and exaggerating confirming evidence; ignoring, forgetting, minimizing and making excuses for disconfirming evidence, and interpreting things as confirmation which really aren’t at all.
Barrett also slipped into at least one other fallacy: the fallacious appeal to authority. When I politely pointed out that her “logic” wasn’t scientific, she rattled off a list of her scientific accomplishments, as if to suggest that if it comes from a scientist, it must be science. Of course, that makes as much sense as saying that since Mozart was a composer, his farts were symphonies.
Gradually, it became clear what Barrett was selling: intelligent design! That’s right, folks—if you’re seeking intelligent design, you needn’t travel to Skunk Holler and get it from some spittle-flecked Bible-pounder; you can get the new improved version right here in California, from a real scientist!
When Osmer (the host) asked if she was saying that God was behind the connections she was seeing, Barrett endorsed that notion. And all those similarities that you or I would call coincidental—well, they’re really messages from the Divine. She made no compelling arguments for her claims. Instead, she showed us a quote from some guy named Benson, which was nothing more than a re-statement of the infamously flawed “argument from design” for the existence of a god, and another quote from Teilhard de Chardin which employed even worse logic to support the idea that love rules the universe, or something like that.
The other indicator that there might be something less than scientifically rigorous going on was that she was giving people an illusion of scientific validity for dubious feel-good beliefs, and she has a book to sell. Ka-ching! No one ever went broke overestimating the public’s appetite for books that tell them what they want to hear.
Both Barrett and Osmer, when called to task for falsely advertising her talk as science, responded that the talk was conjectural and, since conjecture is fundamentally important in science, was therefore scientific. But that’s like saying that, since kissing involves the mouth, anything we do with our mouths is kissing! Flat earth theories, the spoutings of Glenn Beck, and our hopeful sex fantasies are all conjecture; are they science?
Even if everything Barrett said had been carefully qualified as tentative conjecture (which is not how I recall her presentation), it would still have been a travesty, because she was clearly implying that elementary logical fallacies such as the confirmation bias constitute some degree of support for her claims (even if not compelling evidence), and they simply do not. This sets a terrible example.
The difference between scientific and other conjecture is that in science, we don’t rely on logical fallacies as confirmation for conjectures we find attractive. We look for flaws in the reasoning and, when we find that the conjecture is supported by nothing but flawed arguments, we reject it as probably fruitless and move on to the next one.
Science has become a valuable “brand”. It can help sell books and other products, get government funding for projects, enormously boost the credibility of a claim, and give us some degree of appropriate certainty about what’s true and what isn’t. Just as any valuable brand name will engender counterfeits, so too with science. Thousands of products, “healing” techniques, divination systems, philosophies, even religions (Christian “Science”, The Church of Religious “Science”), fraudulently appropriate the valuable mantle of science.
But science has earned its credibility precisely by not allowing itself the kind of crappy, self-deluding “logic” that marred Barrett’s presentation and underlies the numerous beliefs that defraud us by masquerading as science. The next time someone tells you that their idea, their product, their healing or divination technique or whatever is scientific, ask them a few questions, such as, “Have you conducted well-designed tests of falsifiable hypotheses that will show if you are mistaken?”, “Have you solicited critique from those who disagree with you?” and “How have you ruled out the possibility that your conclusion is based on fallacies like the confirmation bias, the effort justification effect, confusing the placebo effect with an objective effect, or…?”
Science has earned its glory as perhaps humanity’s most beautiful and useful creation through centuries of hard, rigorous, brutally honest and self-questioning work. To steal its credibility by claiming unearned scientific validity for unfounded beliefs is a profanation.